The Best American Poetry

Shelley Wong: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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When We Were Young

 

I was a month older. We both had

Chinese last names. She was also

 

Khmer, Thai & Vietnamese: a mix

of enemies. Thailand always

 

stealing temples along the border.

She identified as Khmer because

 

they needed her the most.

We were opposites, like our two

 

eventual cats. I was the aloof one,

lithe & nervous in my Audrey

 

Hepburn sunglasses. She was

the teasing one, smoking cloves

 

slouched in her brother’s frayed

skater clothes, seemingly

 

carefree. After high school, we lived

in New York City, met every

 

Gen X Khmer person in the New England

& Tri-State Area. I shredded papaya,

 

marveled at ahmok. Dancing

at banquets, I flared my fingers

 

like gladiolas opening. Like our elders,

our leisure included free Atlantic City

 

hotel rooms & touring the buffets. She’d blow

through a snapped snow crab leg

 

& split it cleanly, giving me a perfect

piece of meat. Spoiled, she called me

 

against the casino chimes. Her mother called

me oun—daughter. Growing up, she didn’t

 

know which stories about Cambodia

were true. She could sweet talk

 

anybody, especially a security guard.

Four generations deep in America,

 

I was more afraid. Chinese waiters

were confused when she spoke

 

instead of me. I was the light-skinned

tall girl with a blank face, the one who

 

paid the bill & didn’t suck the bones clean.

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Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (2022), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

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                                                                    Tamara de Lempicka, The Girls, ca.1930, oil on canvas.

Poet-musician Terence Winch is a guest on HARRY'S POETRY HOUR [by Earle R. Hitchner]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wBNf-BRb6A&t=1008s

Link above is to guest poets Terence Winch and Kit Robinson who join Harry E. Northup for readings and discussion of their verse on Harry’s Poetry Hour. The program is produced, hosted, and recorded weekly by Northup as a part of MPTF Studios' Creative Chaos. Terence Winch goes first in this audiovisual recording.  

Be sure to move your cursor to the far-left beginning of this audiovisual recording link.

NOTE: One of many highlights in this recording is “Childhood Ground,” a song composed by Terence Winch and performed by singer and pianist Eileen Estes and fiddler Michael Winch, Terence’s son. Go to 17:48 on the horizontal timer of the video.

Among Terence Winch's many books of verse are It Is as If Desire, That Ship Has Sailed, This Way Out, The Known Universe, Lit from Below, Boy Drinkers, The Drift of Things, The Great Indoors, Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, and Irish Musicians/American Friends.  In my considered opinion, Terence Winch is the best writer of villanelles today and overall one of our finest poets.

 “Paradise Bronx,” an article about the Bronx by Ian Frazier in the July 15, 2024, issue of The New Yorker, was mentioned by Terence Winch in Harry’s Poetry Hour.

Alice Notley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Secret

 

Something I don't want anyone to know

having naturally secrets where you hid some thing

under the ground, mine from myself      But are they

only linguistic, something you don't tell

what can the poem say for example or not, Jocko

he was a guy in my class. animals flowers and rocks

spoken of by humans as if mysterious

Are you mad at me? I could list them over

the last seventeen . . . years . . . my eyes hurt.

Ruefully      Some people I dislike I don't tell others

about. I didn't tell you I live alone to act crazy

blistering winds of malfortune keep oh keep arising

my thought comes from nowhere my mis-

shapen mind my mind I hardly recognize in its

abnormality      who recognizes, of course. I'm

being secretive, but all of this comes from a void

Everything's a secret and if you know so

you can act. The blank thought behind all the rules

you don't let yourself know you follow.

You don't want me particularly; I could ap-

prove of your magisterial complicity in how

"we" "do" "things"      Convince me that you secretly . . .

the throes of opportunity . . . complots . . . secretly

And now I would confess some "weakness"

My problem with the confessional: I'm not a

Catholic      took it with her to the grave. Grave Alice

My secret is that I'm in complete control of my-

self; no matter how it seems; and how I do it, is a secret.

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Alice Notley has published over fifty books of poetry and prose, most recently Being Reflected Upon (in which "Secret" may be found), The Speak Angel Series, and Telling the Truth As It Comes Up. She is also a visual artist and collagist and is the author of Runes and Chords, a selection of her poem/drawings. She has edited or co-edited three poetry magazines, CHICAGO, Scarlet, and Gare du Nord. She has also edited or co-edited books by poets Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. Since 1992 Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

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                                                   Felix Nussbaum (1904–1944), The Secret, oil on canvas, 1939.

Rupert Wondolowski: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Tears Are Time Travel

 

I didn’t feel well.

Granny let me stay

home from school.

45 years passed.

Father died.

Like a champ.

Didn’t even dip into

the painkillers the

hospice left in plenty.

The night before he went

I asked him how he was doing.

He said “Okay, I just have to beat this.”

The day he died

bulldozers started tearing

at the woods behind our house.

A long feared and protested event

happening now like a staged

scene in a John Sayles movie.

Mother died.

Not so good.

Howls of the soul so

twisted and agonized that

a lifetime of horror movies,

Catholic school

and Flannery O’Connor

could not prepare me for.

I hunted mushrooms

in my backyard woods

wearing soggy Batman slippers

with my granny.

I’m still there.

I’m pretty much here.

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Rupert Wondolowski is the author of Dreams Are My Social Life (Publishing Genius), Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon the Sea (Fell Swoop), The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius), and The Whispering of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press). From 1988 to 2007 he edited the Shattered Wig Review literary arts zine and Shattered Wig Press, publishing 27 issues of the Review and close to 20 chapbooks by national authors, including many by cult author and artist Blaster Al Ackerman, on the Press.  During that time he also hosted monthly Shattered Wig Nights at the legendary Baltimore club, 14 Karat Cabaret, run by artist Laure Drogoul.

Since 2013 he has performed in spectral folk adjacent The Mole Suit Choir with Liz Downing and, since 2020, Greg Hatem. They have recorded and released three albums, Campfire Spacesuit, Phantom Paddle Boat, and Doomsday Lamp. They set the poetry of Rupert and other Baltimore poets to music with guitar, bowed banjo, and electronics.

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                                                                          Flannery O'Connor. Self-Portrait, 1953

Lola Haskins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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The Discovery

 

On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street

behind two women in their early forties who

are chatting to each other as companionably

as birds on a limb, and having thought, with

happy anticipation, ah, I'll be their age soon!

it occurs to me that I've lost my mind—but

just then the clouds evanesce and light pours

through the oaks and ash, to form lace on

the pavement lovely enough to be sewn

into dresses, and I see that time is as

random as the patterns the sun makes on

any given day as it filters through leaves,

and as illusory as a baby being born, and

as strange as the years of our lives that

go by without returning, and as equal as

the one friend's auburn hair and the red leaf

she steps over, which the wind has abandoned

for love of her.  And now, having finally

seen that the world is every minute new,

I realize that I'm only a little younger than

those women after all, and I step between

them, and we speak as we walk, and by

the time we part, each of us in her own way

has told the others how lucky she is,

to have been alive in such a beautiful place.

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Lola Haskins has published 14 books of poetry and three of nonfiction. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and been broadcast on the BBC and NPR. Her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review, and was a Hoffer Grand Prize finalist. The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the New York Times Magazine and will shortly be featured in The John Clare Journal. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.  

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                                          Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889), Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Jacob Anthony Ramírez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Lives of Jazz Fathers

 

Let’s resurrect the trumpet players;

the saxophonists named for fauna gone

extinct in the Congos and Barrios,

the worship and wail, the shadow song

 

of 40s Noir—black and white ailments

of New York’s terminally cool.

There are no more quartets—

only quartered ensemble split from

 

cities coated to chin, faces blurred white

in pedestrian winds and yellow cabs.

Now, the drummers search estate sales, rummage

for swivel stools to post on Etsy. The bassists

 

study Phlebotomy, read blood panels for Diabetes.

The pianists work dental offices, drill tartars

to reveal the whites of cuspids. The saxophonists

teach Tai Chi classes, sleep at the Chinatown Y.

 

I mean to say I miss them: the notes who stroll

October for pick up chess in parks

with coffees and fingerless gloves; the chop

chords at brick-and-mortar steak houses;

 

the soloists smile in the amber memory

of nightclubs numb with intoxication.

They’re dead – the blue veranda is silent

where they jammed, moon drift in palm

leaves and ivory; notes of copper and zinc.

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Jacob Anthony Ramírez is an educator and poet. He is a distinguished graduate of Lancaster University’s Creative Writing M.A. In 2022, Oxford Brookes University’s Ignition Press released Kitchen Boombox, his debut pamphlet. His poetry appears in The Breakbeat Poets, LatiNEXT, The Best New Poets 2022, and Latino Book Review. He is currently at work on his first full collection in Sonoma County, California, where he lives with his wife and two children.

__________________________________________________________________________________              William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947.

Andrea Cohen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Fable

 

I’m tired of meaning, says the tortoise

to the hare, who agrees. The lions

 

and crows don’t disagree, and the snake

chimes in: it would be better if we didn’t

 

have to moonlight as morality lessons.

Exactly, says the chicken. I’d like to let

 

loose once in a while, I’d like to

stretch my wings, she says. Yes,

 

says the fox. You should get out

of your pen more, says the fox. You

 

should let me help, says the fox,

opening the latch to the evening.

 

It was a fine evening and a fine

conclusion they were coming to,

 

thought the fox, helping the

chicken out of her feathers.

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Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments, Everything, and Nightshade.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

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                                            Aesop, Johann Michael Wittmer (1802–1880), oil on canvas

 

 

Troy Jollimore: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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On the Origins of Things

 

Everyone knows that the moon started out

as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar

flare that fled that hellish furnace

and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended

between the planets. But did you know

that anger began as music, played

too often and too loudly by drunken performers

at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles

evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness

from misunderstanding? As for the dominant

thesis regarding the origin of love, I

abstain from comment, nor will I allow

myself to address the idea that dance

began as a kiss, that happiness was

an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient

game of jump-the-fire gave rise

to politics. But I will confess

that I began as an astronomer—a liking

for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,

a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—

and that my longing for you has not taken me

very far from that original desire

to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls

of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

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Troy Jollimore’s poetry collections include Earthly Delights, Syllabus of Errors, which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of 2015, and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also authored or edited four books of philosophy, including Love’s Vision and On Loyalty. He lives in Northern California, where he teaches philosophy.

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                                                       Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple. Oil on canvas,1663. National Gallery of Art

Esther Lin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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Habit

 

My husband’s favorite is to suffer.

I too have taken this up;

 

I pant for what I can’t have.

The world is full of trite regard.

 

Those who love lightly as houseflies

do so because they expect calamity,

 

and those who love passionately

demand a righting of ancient wrongs.

 

My mother did both.

Her voice high and keen

 

from the bed she routinely took ill.

I brought her pills; she shared them

 

with me and I went off into my own life,

fearing and trusting everyone.

 

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Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024), and author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was featured in the Best of the Net 2023 anthology and Best New Poets 2022. Currently she is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

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                                                   Street art, possibly by Brazilian artist Derlon Almeida.
   

William McPherson’s "Testing the Current" Takes an Encore [by Terence Winch]

It was something of a surprise to the literary world when William McPherson published his first novel, Testing the Current, in 1984. Not that Bill was exactly an unknown—a former book editor at Morrow in NYC, founding editor of the Washington Post’s Book World section (and later a Post columnist), and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1977, Bill seemed to know everyone on the East Coast who had ever written a noteworthy paragraph. At Book World, he opened the doors to coverage of contemporary poetry and even recruited people like me, Michael Lally, and Doug Lang as frequent reviewers. His creative and generous spirit really set him apart from other members of the literary establishment. Though he’d published some poems in The New Yorker and elsewhere, Testing the Current was to be a turning point in his life. He would, eventually, permanently leave the reviewing stand for the stage itself. (above: William McPherson, 1987. Photo (c) Nancy Crampton).

Maybe if the book had bombed, Bill would have remained primarily a journalist, but Testing the Current was met with the kind of reception writers fantasize about. In my copy of the original, I stuck three of the reviews that  greeted the novel’s appearance. Russell Banks, in the NY Times, opens his piece with this: “William McPherson’s first novel is an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.”  People proclaims that Testing the Current  is “a beautiful first novel that provides a sharp, glowing portrait of a Midwestern town on the eve of World War II. McPherson’s loving attention to detail and the ... funny, moving point of view keep the writing constantly fresh and involving.” USA Today says the novel  “...is brilliant. In places it is absolutely breathtaking.”  Testing the Current tells the story of a boy of around eight years old named Tommy MacAllister. Bill followed up on Tommy’s story three years later with To the Sargasso Sea, also well-received.

Ever the adventurer, Bill headed to Europe in 1989 to witness firsthand the fall of the Communist empire, winding up on and off for most of the next six years in Rumania, where he became something of a national celebrity. While that intriguing and amazing sharp turn resulted in some first-rate reporting for several journals, it left his readers still awaiting the third novel in the MacAllister saga. What’s more, the first two novels had long been out of print. (above left Michael Dirda & William McPherson, Politics & Prose Bookstore, DC, 26 Jan 2012)

But, now, thanks to New York Review Books and D.T. Max (who wrote the Afterword), Testing the Current, originally published by Simon & Schuster, is back in print.  And last night at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., a multitude of Bill’s friends and fans turned out for a Q&A between Bill and the eminent writer and critic Michael Dirda, all to mark this significant comeback of an American classic.

Bill McPherson signs a book for DC artist Susan Campbell, Politics & Prose, 26 Jan 2012.

From the archive; first posted January 27, 2013. Ed. note: What a pleasure to reread this post. I reviewed Testing the Current for Newsweek in 1984 and had the pleasure of meeting Bill in DC.  Bernard Welt introduced us. -- DL

Maybe if the book had bombed, Bill would have remained primarily a journalist, but Testing the Current was met with the kind of reception writers fantasize about. In my copy of the original, I stuck three of the reviews that  greeted the novel’s appearance. Russell Banks, in the NY Times, opens his piece with this: “William McPherson’s first novel is an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.”  People proclaims that Testing the Current  is “a beautiful first novel that provides a sharp, glowing portrait of a Midwestern town on the eve of World War II. McPherson’s loving attention to detail and the ... funny, moving point of view keep the writing constantly fresh and involving.” USA Today says the novel  “...is brilliant. In places it is absolutely breathtaking.”  Testing the Current tells the story of a boy of around eight years old named Tommy MacAllister. Bill followed up on Tommy’s story three years later with To the Sargasso Sea, also well-received.

Ever the adventurer, Bill headed to Europe in 1989 to witness firsthand the fall of the Communist empire, winding up on and off for most of the next six years in Rumania, where he became something of a national celebrity. While that intriguing and amazing sharp turn resulted in some first-rate reporting for several journals, it left his readers still awaiting the third novel in the MacAllister saga. What’s more, the first two novels had long been out of print. (above left Michael Dirda & William McPherson, Politics & Prose Bookstore, DC, 26 Jan 2012)

But, now, thanks to New York Review Books and D.T. Max (who wrote the Afterword), Testing the Current, originally published by Simon & Schuster, is back in print.  And last night at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., a multitude of Bill’s friends and fans turned out for a Q&A between Bill and the eminent writer and critic Michael Dirda, all to mark this significant comeback of an American classic.

Bill McPherson signs a book for DC artist Susan Campbell, Politics & Prose, 26 Jan 2012.

From the archive; first posted January 27, 2013. Ed. note: What a pleasure to reread this post. I reviewed Testing the Current for Newsweek in 1984 and had the pleasure of meeting Bill in DC.  Bernard Welt introduced us. -- DL

Philip Metres: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Plague Psalm 90

 

Loss, you have been our regent,

Refusing the refugees
                                     you sent.

You turn hummingbirds to dirt

and feed humans
                       to earth.

 

You wipe out the watchers

In the night of your butcher.

 

Truly we’re boxed in an annex

Of the mansion
                      of your text.

 

By your annotation
                                  we’re smashed,

Filled with the alphabet of wrath.

For the annals of our days

Will be washed away.

 

May we reside
                        in the skies

of others’ eyes.

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Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (2024) and Shrapnel Maps (2020). Winner of three Arab American Book Awards and a Guggenheim, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

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                                     Mohammad Murad Obeidi, 5 Gigabytes of My Memory. Mixed media on canvas, 2011.

Adrian Blevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Quiet Part Out Loud

You are 9/10ths the heresies you cherish /  1/10^th something saintly, beaten & sly.   
                                                                                                ---- Rita Mae Reese

 

Years after it was over and he was gone, I would think of the unfortunate woman
he was living with now and engaged to marry. Poor woman with the face so pale and flat

like a slide down a mountain rock. Poor plus-fifty bride-to-be with the voice too whispery
and the chin too jutty. The hair too thin and white, the thighs too big, the walk so lumbering.

Years after it was over and he was gone, the face of that woman would wake me like I myself
had been recruited to fuck her and I had to get my courage up. Did I suspect that my ex-husband

couldn’t really want to do it? Or was I trying to find a way to finally face his lack of a certain
vital fervor? Was my ex-husband also unlovely? A petty bureaucrat?  Stupidly matter-of-fact?

A tawdry accident? But the teeth too small! The cheeks too wide! And the whole head far too big
like a pond on the end of a stick. And me so superficial with my sick heart in the darkness going

horse, horse, cow, cow. Yes yours truly that hollow like a puddle on a road at midnight in a ghost town
by amine. Honestly I did not care what he did except for what it said about the ugliness in me

that I could not seem to get over the ugliness of her. Unless that’s wrong and I did care that he would
dare taint our lost little family with a woman with a face like that. We had lived on a granite hillside

overlooking an ancient lake in a house of African violets. All around us my father’s paintings
like a cove of orange blossoms. Or a river of luxe bodies oiled to flame on a sunset beach.

And this antique lamp my mother gave us—this knockout of a lamp glowing on the desk
where I shut my eyes now to try to see everything like something died and made it Queen.

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Adrian Blevins is the author of Status Pending, winner of the Maine Literary Prize for Poetry (Four Way Books, 2023); Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree; The Brass Girl Brouhaha; and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a co-edited collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among others. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                         Quinten Massys (Flemish, ca. 1465--1530), Ill-Matched Lovers.

 

Paul Genega: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Clip / Caste

 

It’s the Friday before a holiday so the barber shop

is wild with boys, all from my school, none a friend.

 

Glum in the back, I wait to be summoned to one of four

barbers. Jimmy the owner up front is the one you want

 

and the cool boys from the nice blocks swarm

his chair, jostling each other, laughing big laughs

 

until they are called to the clippers, while I—

predictably—get Pete, short guy with the fourth chair

 

who quickly snips, buzzes, rubs in green goo, combs.

I hand him the coin father gave me for the tip.

 

He says nothing. Nor do I. Outside in the gathering

dusk, Jimmy’s boys are waiting for their pals.

 

Our haircuts, I see, all look perfectly the same.

But theirs are better.

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Paul Genega is the author of Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023 (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and six previous collections. His poetry received the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award from The New York Quarterly, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. He is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College, New Jersey, where he founded the creative writing program, taught literature and writing, and served as chair of Humanities. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                 Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, Brooklyn, NY, 1959

Natasha Rao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Abecedarian on Shame

 

A mushroom quietly throbs with poison. I

bloat full of lies. Spurred by my

capacity for ruin, I insulted my brother

during the brief visit home, got too drunk in the

expensive restaurant while my mother’s worry

fermented. When confronted with my lack of

gentleness, I blame birth control or the moon, but

haunted by the palpitations of a mouse stuck

in glue, I knew atonement was beyond my trapping.

Just months ago I shaved all my fur then

knelt naked in front of not-you, have

laid in unfamiliar beds, squeak becoming purr,

metamorphosing into whatever kind of

nocturnal creature strangers desire. I keep

offering the soft meat of myself to

people I meet on the internet, save the stinging

quills for those who love me. I don’t know how to

reassemble myself into the kind of animal who

sniffs her way home every time. Somewhere,

there is a version of me whose instinct is to

tell the truth. She has no reason to

unravel in the doctor’s office, no sudden fits of

viciousness and rage. She does the right thing even

when no one is looking. I envy her timeline, the

x-axis aligned. Somehow I grow more twisted, each

year eluding guilt with skill. It’s easiest to pluck

zinnias if you don’t look them in the face.

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Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently Co-Editor of American Chordata. 

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                                           Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy). 1897, oil on canvas. 
                                                      

George Bilgere: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tar Pits

The last time I saw my father
was at the La Brea Tar Pits
a year after the divorce.

He was still living in St. Louis,
running the business
to the bottom
of a fifth of Jim Beam.

In my mind’s eye
he is a specimen, a foetus
of a father, floating in a jar
in some roadside museum.

I was nine. We had nothing
to say, so he took me
to the La Brea Tar Pits, as
divorced fathers do.

He was a membrane
at that point.
An effigy trembling
in another man’s suit.

We stared
at the three-toed sloth,
the dire wolf with its
marble eyes.

My father, I wish
you could rise from that
black pit and emerge

into light, like the tiger
we saw that day,
sheathed again in muscle,
its great teeth like sabers.

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George Bilgere’s ninth collection of poetry is Cheap Motels of My Youth, which won the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize.  In 2021 he won the New Ohio Review Editor’s Choice award. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the Pushcart Foundation, the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two exceptionally fine little boys.

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                                                                Saber Toothed Tiger lithograph, ca. 1902

 

Maria Martin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Year of the Rat

 

The evenings came and went, but I did not.

I didn’t have what I needed. I needed air

in my tires. I needed to go to the store.

I didn’t have enough money. I ate sleeves

of saltines dripped with hot sauce.

I ate a potato microwaved with cheese.

The dishes all piled up like a sidewalk

memorial. I didn’t like to walk past them.

It was another warm winter. Squirrels gathered.

The mailbox received. Ivy lurched 

into the sidewalk toilfully, but I did not. 

And every day was another day I didn’t do it. 

Daylight receded like a bad dream.

The one where your teeth fall out

like twisted kernels of corn

and you wake up ashamed

and glad you are alone.

I couldn’t open my mail. 

Stacks of envelopes with cellophane panes. 

Who told them my name?

I was a rat and I lived like a rat. 

I slept on old laundry. I ate what I found. 

My torso covered over with dry, red scales.

I was afraid I’d be discovered. 

I avoided bright open spaces. 

I avoided ammonia. I was afraid

someone was coming for me,

but then they didn’t.

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Maria Martin is a poet living in North Charleston, SC where she works for the city coordinating arts enrichment programs for public schools. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Diagram, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

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                                                                             Girl with dirty dishes, A.I. image

Kurt Olsson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Devolution

 

The summer I turned eighteen I worked underground,

eight non-union hours spent scuffing a shopping cart of tools

through the long damp linking one laboratory to the next.

Damnedest thing I ever saw: a mutt bleary from sleep

wracked in the rictus of an eighty-year-old smoker’s cough.

I apprenticed for Rick, who weekends burned himself

electric red and drank a case of beer and who talked for hours

about devolution, learned from a rock band, and how

mankind was sliding back to slime. Sometimes he made sense

in those tunnels lined with hollow lockers, lab coats squishing by

in cheap Keds. They never told us what happened to the animals,

a lecture hall-sized room lined with cages, pink eyes rolling.

After Rick, there was Ned, who lasted a week, then Bob,

a Vietnam vet who drove a VW Bug and had been beautiful once

before his hair fell out and who looped his ball-peen under his belt

and strode about stoned, looking for a room. One morning

he went AWOL, then returned a week later and cried when Lou,

the boss, canned him. After my first day, Lou never came to site.

He was home dying of emphysema, or maybe it was a bum liver,

maybe he wasn’t dying at all, but by summer’s end all he was

was the static on a speaker phone doling out assignments and pleading,

Please, do whatever Mr. Liberaci tells you to. Which wasn’t much.

Liberaci’d already hired the next contractor, guys in buzz cuts

and the bullhorn tones of those who can afford the new houseboat.

By my last week everybody had quit but me. Lou didn’t call anymore.

A coat told me a subject had escaped, to keep an eye out,

the whole complex a maze of vents. It might show up anywhere:

frightened, hungry, drugged, who knew what it was capable of.

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Kurt Olsson’s work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and the Southern Review. He’s published two award-winning collections of poetry, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press) and What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out later this year from Fernwood Press. He lives a stone's throw from Lake Michigan where he's pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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                                                                         VW bug, photograph by Rebecca Korpita

Nancy Miller Gomez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Why I Tie My Hair to Trees

 

Thick, black handfuls gathered

from the comb. I carry the nest of it

outside to drape on a low-hanging branch

of the oak. Later when I look, it’s gone,

carried off by wind or birds.

I like to imagine it as home

for song sparrows, the strands

woven into the twigs and leaves.

Or collected by wood rats

along with cobwebs and cloth

and buried in the woodpile,

a piece of me nestled into the lives

of these creatures. Or maybe,

blown into the trees, tangled

in the lacy crown of the hemlock.

At night, when the outlines

of familiar objects run into the dark,

I like to think there is a part of me

that isn’t afraid, one slender curl

shining in the moonlight.

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Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024) and the chapbook, Punishment (Rattle, 2018), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa  Cruz County Jails, and the Juvenile Hall. She has a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego, and an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. She has worked as a waitress, a stable hand, an attorney, and a tv producer. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. 

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                                                   Édouard Vuillard, Beneath the Trees, 1897--99. Oil on cardboard.

Alan Bernheimer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Breakfast

 

Forgetting words

The moment you

Hear or read them

 

Is one way to avoid

Plagiarizing but just

Keep their flavor

 

And then try

Expressing that

In your own words

 

As if you could

Own words

You can't even

 

Keep thoughts

From slipping away

They’re the slipperiest

 

Of all the slippery

Things in life

The hotel elevator

 

That rises way

Past the roof

And slips across

 

A higher landscape

A different neighborhood

Why not ask

 

If any of these

Places will be

Open for breakfast

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Alan Bernheimer is a poet and translator living in Berkeley, Calif. His latest collection is From Nature (Cuneiform Press, 2019). His translation of Philippe Soupault’s memoir, Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, was published by City Lights in 2016. He recently edited “Retroscope,” a selection of literary travel writing from the past at Nowhere magazine.

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                                                 Irish breakfast, 19 March 2024. Photo by Don Berger

Cleo Qian: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Animal, Look

 

The miracle is not that this
is a lover’s poem, but that I
am the one writing it.

In the bathroom, I perch
at the edge of the tub
while she brushes her teeth
under the light.

Firm line of muscle behind the round shoulder,
stencil sketch of the sharp backbone.

It isn’t that I believed I would never love again,

only,

sometimes, these several years,
I believed I would never love again.

I wrote about deserts, copper,
shorelines and springs.
How the hourglass of life never
is turned.

Now, this woman’s back against my blue
brushed-cotton sheets.

The miracle was not her:
tender, vain, playful,
certain to leave.

Cold edge of the bathtub.
Harsh light of midnight.

It was my own heart I marveled at,
its skip and unease,

How it shifted, a small animal in its nest
raising its head, finally, to look.

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Cleo Qian (she/her) is a queer fiction writer and poet born in California. She is the author of the short story collection Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go (Tin House, 2023) which was one of Time’s 100 Best Books of the Year as well as being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other accolades. Her writing has been published in outlets including ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, and others.

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French, School of Fontainebleau (last quarter of 16th century), Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa sur la duchesse de Villars (Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters).

Mosab Abu Toha: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

       for Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

I.

When you open my ear, touch it

gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

 

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

 

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.

Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

 

II.

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away—

rid my small ear canal of them all.

 

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,

my doctor, day and night.

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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.  His writings from Gaza have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Review, among others. His second poetry book, Forest of Noise, is forthcoming from Knopf in October 2024. [Author photo credit: Mohamed Mahdy]

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                                                               Sliman Mansour, Mother and Her Child (أم وطفلها), oil on canvas, 2016.